Episode 99: Dr. William Courtney â€“ The Modern Pioneer of Cannabis Juicing

Here are your hosts Ian Jessop and Corrie Yelland – Ian: Welcome to another episode of Cannabis Health Radio, I'm Ian Jessop – Corrie: And I'm Corrie Yelland – Ian: Just a quick reminder if you'd like to help us continue Cannabis Health Radio then we welcome your donations Go to our webpage cannabis health radio

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Our guest today can be described as the modern pioneer in juicing of the cannabis plant to heal He has an extensive education in microbiology, a doctor of medicine, earned his post doctorate in forensic examination and forensic medicine and he's a member of a number of cannabis organizations including the International Association of cannabis as medicine (IACM) Joining us from the Caribbean island of Dominica is dr William Courtney Dr

Courtney, very good of you to do this, I appreciate it! – Dr Courtney: And I just as an update on that I put thanks for the introduction also will involve with Todd my career who is the saint who took the phrase in the California law of that cannabis was to be made available for the relief of any other condition which it provides relief so which although that gay California the right to use cannabis for anything is taught and remember we go down to his office for meetings and we decided that we're going to try to build a credibility you know the pot doc a little bit and so there's now an American Academy of cannabinoid medicine I'm a diplomat of that of that organization and now they've asked me to write questions for the certifying exam and it is just trying to help those on the margin of this real or is this just teaching wrong to kind of say well you got to have three years of experience seeing patients you have to have attended in a wide range of continuing medical education courses and then you have to test the certifying examination there you know to be a diplomat or a member of the group so we're trying to bring more credibility just so that we can ease people's concerns regarding the validity and credibility and the science behind the cannibal I'm wondering dr Courtney what prompted you to move from California to the Caribbean on the a number of things you know it's we're still need of serious clinical trials and kristin is has a lot of training and research design and statistics to move forward there are several things that we need we need a serum saito cannabinoid level and as we speak as a credibly gracious mahmood of solely who is a the pinnacle of analytic chemistry in this area having done hundreds of thousands of analyses for probably the federal government anyone that wanted cannabis analyzed well he is developing the protocol because if you want to see what your serum cannabinol can I bidaai Alec acid level is you need to go through a number of steps because remember photo cannabinoid levels in the serum or when me one two three four five seven Nana grandpa millimeter and very low level so you need very sophisticated equipment and motor for that to work you have to clear out a lot of a lot of other substances and so once that protocol is set up then we'll be able to look at bioavailability in a meaningful way and sense of if you take a hundred people and you give each of them 20 leaves of cannabis you know when you allow them to eat that daily for on month or two and then you do a serum level you're going to find a range of extreme levels or CBD a and what that tells you is and this person maybe had hyper acidic environment in the stomach one had a rapid transit and so the shoulders moving quickly what is it absorbed this one is taking medicines for seizures or for cancer and so the river is in a hyper state of metal metabolism and what that does is trap the oral cannabinoids lowering the third level so they got some of them has a very serious cancer situation you want to know that you're doing it clinically accurate trial you want to know that what you're giving them is making it into their blood so you can say okay we've tried it at this level for this many weeks and would either increase it or we can switch to a different terminology cannabinoid profile and look at different parameters but so sphere level is going to be a critical element that's being developed and we're hoping the foundations hoping to get some support to bring on an HPLC I perform and high pressure liquid chromatography machine that has a double ms double mass spectrometer on the back side so it allows you to make a little very very accurate sensitive things we're going to live with that analytic equipment what the protocol then we're in a very small environment here with a they say 70,000 probably 50,000 people most of them are very comfortable of cannabis but their church holding that in nations convention on narcotic drugs that really provides all the authority to the consider Controlled Substances Act in the United States the whole world is is burdened by the convention on narcotic drugs and fearful of invoking for trifles if they violate them but within the environment we're hoping to get understanding support because the government is smaller that we can work with it and we can create special research and so that would begin to get some statistics and some accurate all sense of the treatments that we're trying and comparing and we can begin to put some real rural science behind it really is black box medicine and I'm actually in the process of writing a pre-publication paper in that area as we speak and 400 years we had no idea how a splint worked but that didn't prevent us from using an analgesic and anti-inflammatory it gave some relief had him for babies you know it had a lot of efficacy before we began to look at the cox-2 inhibitors and you know mm speculate on some of the biochemical mechanisms action that explained why Aspen provided room really well cannabis is very very very complex plan integrating according to Professor out of Italy 150 different cannabinoids and 130 terpenes and if you look at the permutation combination of that you end up with a pretty complex picture you toss in all the other classes of compounds and most live annoyed and one proxy mean this dissolve full range of constituents and Western medicine likes to know what the active ingredient is like to extract that and then make a pure compound and when I was a medical school they didn't really like you prescribing 86 dose medicine so if you had high blood pressure and you were using one medicine to stop the blood pressure but then maybe a second one to spare potassium and to put those two in the same till you couldn't really regulate it very well they referred you you two different medicines exactly five milligrams with that in 25 of this is it perfect combination for you on your narrative geology and so when you go to that group who want a model molecular active ingredient they take a look at cannabis and it's not like they call them they call it the Church of it as dirty ligands where all these molecules in a dirty because there's so many of you don't know which one is acting which one synergistic and which one of them is a positive allosteric which ones are negative and so it's like it causes extreme anxiety and then you you go to that same medical group and if you say well you know right now the United States government has intellectual property that is now under license to canalize for the development of medications for traumatic brain injuries and for our liver conditions and right now GW is in clinical phase three trials a CBD product for children with DeRay and it was a patient of mine a long time ago that laid down the ground or diamond which Toliver's one child had had injuries and a gun went through all the traditional aunt Ethel ethics and I went through the experimental anti-epileptic and eventually after being placed on tilt the max for three or four years finally sympathy this is really unacceptable I mean call the topamax as a kind of blunt the physical expression of the seizure so that family members are not facing well the reality of what's going on so you know I guess we moved into cannabis and so we started out with the one to one went to a two-to-one know where these went to a 3 to 1 meaning three times as much CBD sth see a little bit of minor relief and then we got ahold of this plan on a Barcelona that was twenty-two percent to have a dialogue acid upon heating converted into CBD and suddenly his child we went from Clearwater today to a couple of week we're hoping in this environment to be able to develop on library of genetics and with tissue culture supply them to anyone in the world if you wanted in a one-to-one plant meaning equal amount of THC CBE and when you say that you're always referring to CBD acid tht acid as well as the decarboxylated form now Eve you got spinal cord injury ms anyone 0 1 21 which should all that genetic if you wanted a plant that was a period of one meaning in three times as much CBD CBD eight th see that's I've been identified as useful for the inflammatory bowel diseases crowns all sort of colitis we can ship you out in their own a tissue culture and you can grow it up and have the ability to include individualized cytogenetic into your dietary considerations and other things that you're doing for your help dr Courtney I I don't want to get too technical in this but I want to listeners to understand above the ingestion of cannabis and why juicing is so much more powerful than other methods of ingestion can you be killin it yes you need consumption of raw cannabis is the way that deer bear boar rabbits rats cats dogs animals 434 million years would consume cannabis in their environment and what is in the environment most of the time is the leaf many of those animals will not eat the bud when it's there in that phase that have continued to be the league and when you eat the leaf you're eating an incredibly complex and delicate substance we know that cannabis has a smell those are the terpenes and if you smell the plant other yards away those are tripping is drifting in the air those are the 10 to 15 carbon aromatic small molecules by themselves antineoplastic anti-inflammatory analgesic antibacterial antiviral terpenes a very important class and those are just drifting away with the order of the plant when you take this living plan and you put it in your mouth you're going to have the best most complete terpenoid profile they're also going to be picking up the best of the cannabinoid profile one there's no idea where same as 150 of those and and so when you use the living plant you're getting an incredibly complex and singer just its meaning if you're willing to meet the living plant giving be getting the terpene which some are known to act at a secondary site that that alters the function of the cannabinoid receptor and you're getting the cannabinoid that acts at the primary muscle steric site so you have multiple classes of molecules acting on the same receptor in your immune system and your nervous system and your musculoskeletal bone remodeling whatever where I was going on and so we there been living plant is we need we lighting know it in yeah yeah that's right when you juice cannabis or you you don't get high to THC in the cannabis plant because it's not heated does not get you high is that because it's THC a exactly why it's a delicate molecule it does break down at room temperature and for people that are into using the bud for high THC preparations the THC the teach the acid will degrade to THC at room temperature as you apply heat you rapidly accelerate that decarboxylation or the conversion of non psychoactive tht acid entity agency we had one plant that was thirty percent wait to wake THC acid in that plant the amount of free psychoactive THC was a quarter of one percent in a plan which know there was a hundred and twenty times more PhDs and this similarly CBD acid breaks down into CBD CBG acid and it turns out very interesting lead in the raw a plan with this very high content of cannabinoid acids on these acids many of them are acting at what was called the orphan receptor and when when they're acting at the orphan receptor they're involved in tumor metastasis in tumor growth and when you heat the plant before the acid you lose that interaction which probably is of some benefit and certain neoplastic conditions so when you're when you're eating the plant raw you're getting a synergistic multifactorial evolutionary gift a gift that has been developed and refined and tested over time and I believe collaterally and so humans particularly in the medical model if I'm a suitable model then what is the active ingredient in this point man over the longest time with THC and everything else was just we don't care tht essen was a storage molecule when it was released by he became the active molecule well CBD is kind of taken on that and I'm probably responsible for a lot of that and CBD is important but it's important in in a context and the context is there's any normal numerous amount of CBD acid in the living planet and there is some TBD and that's where he must get into problem he's kind of like it's a little of good more is better and a lot as best know if one is to Jews cannabis I've heard you say that you need to take a fat with it why is that so these are very fat soluble molecules and they're very kind of water in song the best way to use cannabis is to chew it or to make a little cut and put it in your mouth like chewing tobacco and just kind of carry it around because that treats the infections in the mouth and you have a slow delivery of antibacterial zemanta inflammatories to the instructions of the MOSFET release chemokines cytokines that aggravate every under condition of the body so chewing it is really the high point chewing is a good way to go and you can dice it and put it in form you can kind of cover the flavor and texture a little bit blending is next up list because that is going to put all of the fiber into you can choose a bunch of vegetables and then you blend a cannabis and say give a hundred percent of this content and then juicing you know which I'm strongly associated with and I did for a long time and is the other incredible value but it's also incredibly wasteful because if you look at the pulp that comes out of that machine you take that open I know someone who was saving it in their freezer and was it was inadvertently thought could be chopped spinach man-made a finish the play out of it and the Pope was heated that spinach souffle was our casserole was very psychoactive so there's a lot of uh dr Courtney in in the medical cannabis world even those of us who aren't on the science now but just are treating people with cancer that are trying to treat ourselves you're really well recognized for treating a baby at eight months old who had a brain tumor could you tell us about that yes and this is there was a gentleman who was he using actually in oil that because a three point eight percent TBT oil and it was an inoperable tumor and i believe the fellow had to had to go and seek a third medical opinions in the pediatric oncologist because the first you were the store getting it bigger it makes a mass effect and pushes the brain isn't there's a fibrous sheet that the brain sits on and the brainstem goes through that well if you push if you mechanically push more of the brain to that opening you compress it and death often occurs in situations where there's a large bleed in the brain or there's large mass because of that process and so the oncology is going it just get any bigger you're going to herniate the youngest and the child will die from that mass spec so we really need to reduce the size of that children since we can't operate we're going to see the radiation and chemo and you needed begin it now and the father's like the first electric oncologist when I went to a second the second one said the same thing and you thank the second i went to a third until we finally found and that colleges who said well you seem like you want to do something like you've done you've got a plan up your sleeve and you need a little bit of time we'll wait 30 days no you this is a single snapshot we can't absolutely guarantee those grown but given the size of it at the age it probably has been and will continue and if you come back in a month and this has gotten any bigger then I cannot be associated with any more delays and that was all that the the patient needed to kind of demonstrate that there was a shift in lucency which is no big density or opacity of the tumor the tumor was it was the structure was kind of decreasing and it was dramatic enough that the decision was made wallet but come back again in under two days and he and suddenly they're saying person's got lighter and lighter and then began shrinking them and that was a pretty dramatic and another that was so that was more with an oil and another child to you know a pontine aggressive I think there's a typical rhabdomyosarcoma 24 hours of surgery when the first week she went into the hospital solution stable the tumor grew back there went to chemo they went to chemotherapy they knew was an aggressive tumor so you make the decision are we going lethal or non-lethal given the aggressive severity of the tumor it went to a chemo that was 10 * lethal which means that you kill the bone marrows in childhood and bone marrow transplant after the chemotherapy to survive item igloo back again and then so they decided that she needed a massive emitting radiation to telenor general anesthesia and then irradiated the brain same range them for I was 42 days in a row the child was put into general anesthesia for radiation now when the twin the hood looked like the tumor was joined back again the decision was besides me of the thought there was nothing more they could do and the question was do they want the child in the hospital at home and they wanted a child come back Northern California local pediatrician just with them there's some newspaper articles that i hope to kind of scan up and get on the website of cannabis international the local pediatrician said well you know Mazel plug cannabis choose and first mount my shelves that we can offer and you know it seems to be a popular an area and the child just started clearing MRIs and timbers shrinking and I think it was two and a half years out or a year and half out another MRI with the radiologist said well it's quite unusual given the level of radiation that she had received it would take five years to reabsorb the scar tissue and they're at a year and a half the starchy she was gone and and so here was this kind of miraculous permission that I don't included the tumor but included some of the residual scar tissue and this was a young lady that was doing she did come home at the height of their potency of elation cameo and June July plants at the height of veg the cannabinoid concentration is at its highest be eighty to ninety falls off sharply that goes in the flower she came home then to a community where everyone had food to resize cannabis plants and neighbors are just bring over bags from the grocery store and so she had really unlimited access to very high quality cannabis and so she was able to do I think she's between between four and six ounces of what I call to I'll eat cheese which is wash the plan off let it dry in the Sun toward they come back and converse with the next day she set up there's not a lot of juice and Canada sins so the amount that she was consuming was pretty dramatic and we don't know given that has no medical benefit you know you can vary due at a quick controlled studies but my sense is that possibly seen you know two offices would have been sufficient we don't we don't have a handle it obviously was sufficient for her and I run into her in the grocery store three or four or five years later on but that's what we're hoping to do down here is to get to get a handle on some levels doses how much it takes to get a quick trial visit one Alex it soaks before they zero in on some of the profiles of plant that may be related to specific conditions and um that's very that's a very interesting story one of the things I think that we face in society today because cannabis has been illegal in most areas of the world for over 80 years is the fact that the study of this is really in its infancy is it not it truly is and what do you see as the biggest challenge facing you in your work um someone willing to step up to the united nations convention on narcotic drugs and say well they don't really allow countries to back out of that tree um but any law that is bad law is no law and this law is so bad that it really had does not have a force of law but it takes someone who say you know this plant is being the United States government is financially profiting from this plant in for medicinal purposes so let's say it has some you cannot tell me it has none and tell my kids with autoimmune disorders and cancer and diabetes to you know die and go through rigorous painful treatments because because the United Nations treaty says it has no medical value so I noted and yet everyone is terrified terrify the world imaginations convention and until you know some Paraguay or somebody just really says if I don't really care now come here and arrest me if you want you on but my Spanish was a little rusty and the idea of trying to pass and medical and bar and medically amination and spanish people michael dennis you know duck a court need the medical profession today in my view and i'm sure many others would agree with me has been captured by pharmaceutical industry pushing pills for symptom relief seems to be the medical paradigm based on your extensive conventional medical education did you learn very much that actually helped you heal people well I gave me biochemistry plant biology microbiology pathophysiology so I learned a lot about illness and disease I try to bring nutrition in the medical school and thread the film a out there gorgeous stainless steel commercial kitchen that could every time you said one for a meal and here's a tray of food every item of what's in it you would become educated in sources of meetings amount and how you do a two-week low salt diet through a two-week ad a diet and you've developed tolerance and Sony to tell someone look at work and we try to side I can tell you it is disgusting but we gotta step beyond that you know what they they said you know if I wanted to study the Trish and I should become a nutritionist and and so they put in 45 vending machines and all these medical students were fed out of cellophane sandwiches and they had this beautiful kitchen shut down so I make the problems with small education and we need that the right now you know GW is somewhere around five hundred patents pending on cannabis nameĂ­s bioscience is a publicly traded corporation in the united states we've got all and that has a lot of cannabinoids in the pipeline candlelight with licensing the federal patent for products so the new physician you know and there is an excellent health canada document odern circuit page is trying to bring the nurses and doctors up to speed as to the role cannabis and will sadly the bit data to primarily focuses on THC and dried plant and doesn't really give a lot of room for the terpenes and the whole beauty of this plan is food but it shows now here's a country that wants to educate everyone who didn't have it because in order to understand medicine is coming out you're going to need to so what's the cannabinoid receptor and what do we mean we're acting if you can do I mean when you could repurpose a dragon and then the process of you can shave a billion dollars and any time you can save a billion dollars you raise someone's attention when they took a medicine that was good for high blood pressure and maybe said well let's repurpose this and it had to be good for erectile dysfunction look call this viagra and you suddenly have a product that's already approved for uses women beat you save a billion dollars and then you make a trillion and that's the kind of numbers that keep that industry kind of excited well this that industry is being pushed yelling and screaming into cannabinoid science why it's sadly it's still this monomolecular and I refuse to give this plant up to here is the active ingredient with CBD let's see create or to severe whatever it is and so what but in fact you know the science is coming the people are beginning to learn about it in a really big one big repurposing was tamoxifen which is huge for me the breast cancer a lot of people use it to a lot of benefit movie they were trying to figure out how to repurpose that drug and they found out that that is the first known positive allosteric modulator of the second cannabinoid binding receptor now that's a mouthful but tamoxifen X at cb2 and a positive fashion enhancing its function o Allah the Wonder it's useful in cancers and the city 2 is a reactive receptor that's installed in the membrane when the cell is distressed or disease or has some going on and it's kind of a lot of assistance and so to me the thing I'm most excited about living to see is you take a medicine that has clinical efficacy and it's currently thought to act in this direction pretty confident that we're going to find that anything that really is effective in the field of medicine is interfacing in this cannabinoid regulatory system and we need to clear the humility and I know this much food be your medicine no this is this is me the ultimate food is medicine because if you eat it vent disease and you don't need medicine if you are efficiency state and then it becomes medicine because you only need cannabis as medicine because we did not have cannabis as food because that's fluted prevents a disease for which medicines become you know uh necessity mm-hmm dr

Corey back to this eight months old with a brain tumor just to clarify that this child have like raw cannabis juice or did they use cannabis oil and if so was that high THC or high CDD or what was due to the particular this was um this is a study that I was not really involved in I know his father were well and i believe the child came up once and he was some that he was doing it wasn't oil and it was a at that point a 38 gb percent wake awake CBD oil was pretty unusual so it at least had a little more complexity than pure THC so the eight months old what was it was an oil and sure that there was PhD in it but i don't have to break down on that amount it was not a product that i was supplying to them it was someone he reached out and I it could have been just to get my approval of his muse of it and so if someone you know it was four or five hundred miles away from me no another patient who was at the age of eight will put on methotrexate form juvenile rheumatoid and it took a couple of years to get that child over to raw cannabis and off of methotrexate look improved and crew function improve response and it's that same thing where is it's something that has a very low side effect profile gives you the results in one min at least in neuropsychiatry you select the drug by the side effect profile and you go through them by most benign side effect profile to there are more aggressive profiles as you as you grow came in a different terrains machine where raw cannabis does not does not get any more benign than that what kind of this provides a lot of assistance with ancillary systems that could contribute to the final result but because we are so kind of both monomolecular and single system you know if you support another system in the body that could actually contribute persistently so if there is a very complex system that supports intracellular regulation that leads to improve function so maybe an improvement in the thyroid function compliments and a proven in the white blood cell or the macrophage of the antibody and so there's a room for a lot of utility that we can't label yet and when you use something as complex as this living plant is gonna be a long time before we all know that but at oily as oil is a concentrated approach and a nepeta colloidal did have the highest amount of CBD that he could get his hands on but I don't know what the percentage of THC was in that all okay thank you you know for every 30 calls I get from parents these days 29 of them are children with brain tumors in your opinion do you think raw cannabis alone would treat that or do you think they should be on a fifty-fifty THC CBD do you have any input on that my input is that and then once you know I'm going to say well cannabis is something that you begin day one and you have a computer analyze lucency examination if its a math object and I believe like I believe a computer that was set up at seven days could say okay this looks like a match let's push this trial out if you if you have you know that's what we need to prove established down here is the seven-day trial sufficient or is it a 14 day trial and that trial has to be adequately which means the child's serum level has to show that that is getting through there's or diarrhea in the liver and there leaky gut and a gastric a simulation mean once we know the child's getting sufficient amount and then we can say okay two-week trial insufficient let's just move to either a different strain or two different oil all this being conducted while the oncologist is trying to select the correct combination of you know Kristin been blessing and whatever else they would like to step it up with but if it's something like raw cannabis shows that there's that there is a sensitivity and the term is going to vary mission then that is the drug of choice because of the side effect profile it is a therapeutic essential which is a level above a dietary sentence you should take that out of the diet the APC will grip backwards the tumor will be allowed to recurse so it's important to help and the families realize that you know its food is not just food it is medically as medicine and in your case it's a life-sustaining car and you really don't want to play game you know and say okay I'm cheered now I'm just going to stop because once once you stop them under the idea that you're cured your your immune system a little twist back to a different level of function in which the thing will recur yeah exactly yeah dr Courtney was great to talk you I see your dogs or have arrived so will will let you go I appreciate your time thank you very much yes and you folks have a very good day and if people have questions cannabis international done o RG is as our website and they can reach me through email and I do consultations with anyone that has specific questions and soon we'll have hopefully a facility down in dominica for we were hoping they reaching down here to establish an end-stage cancer treatment facility and it's a slow slow moving natasa but I think we're making good progress and elderly will be able to work with people in the near future her them and they not here okay I mean it within a year which hopefully ever have permission to kind of go on to play great thank you very much for your time thank you Scott to Kourtney really appreciate it have a good day you need as well bye bye bye and that's it another edition of cannabis health radio wherever you are in the world thanks very much for listening you've been listening to the cannabis house radio podcast visit our website cannabis else radio calm and follow us on Facebook and Twitter ok